


In Treatment

by DamsonDaForge



Series: In Treatment [1]
Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Awkwardness, Boss/Employee Relationship, Bullying, Childhood Trauma, Counseling, Gen, Loneliness, Therapy, reaching out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:34:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24943933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DamsonDaForge/pseuds/DamsonDaForge
Summary: An occasional series that will centre around Geordi's various therapy sessions over the years and the subsequent outcomes and consequenses that result.Geordi's annual appointment with Counselor Troi coincides with his difficulties in dealing with one Lt. Reginald Barclay.  Deanna sees an opportunity.Takes place just before the coda of the episode 'Hollow Pursuits'.
Relationships: Geordi La Forge & Deanna Troi, Geordi La Forge & Reginald Barclay
Series: In Treatment [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1870396
Comments: 17
Kudos: 31





	In Treatment

**Author's Note:**

> Deals with childhood bullying and loneliness.
> 
> Further characters and relationships will be added with new chapters and so tags and warnings will change over time.

It was an area that he had always kept blocked and protected. Deanna had her suspicions as to why and it was time that Geordi explored what the consequences of that might be.

“I wanted to start by discussing Lt. Barclay,” she said.

Geordi looked at her, surprise written all over his face. 

“You want to talk about _Reg_?” 

He had been very apprehensive about their scheduled annual appointment and Deanna often found throwing a gentle curveball question right at the beginning of a session helped to break that tension.

“Just for a little while. How are things?”

“Uh… better, not great. But better, he’s a little less stressed, I think. Things are still awkward.”

“I find it interesting that you reached out to Data and connected with him very early on. A lonely, isolated person that you instinctively felt able to help. So do you know why you were able to reach out to him but not to Reg?”

That threw Geordi completely.

“I… I hadn’t ever thought of it like that,” he said after floundering for an age.

“I think part of it is that you’re Reg’s commanding officer, that changes the dynamic right away,” Deanna said.

She felt Geordi’s immediate relief that the question had been brought back to something work-related. His relief was going to be short-lived however, because Deanna was going to need to dig into areas of his life that Geordi had kept locked away for years.

“You’re an engineer, a problem solver. You work your way through methodically, until you reach a solution. But what happens when no matter what you try, it doesn’t work?”

“I guess I get frustrated.”

And then Deanna felt the realisation dawning on him.

“Like I did with Reg,” Geordi said quietly.

“I understand his was an unusual set of issues, but I think there was more going on than just Reg’s difficulties.”

She left some space for him to digest what she’d said and waited for his response.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” he said and his confusion pulsed with something like fear.

“You moved around a lot as a child?”

“Mom and dad are both in Starfleet, so yeah.”

“Did you know that before the Enterprise, the longest you’d been anywhere was when you were at the Academy?”

“No,” said Geordi, sounding surprised. “Is that right?”

“That must have been hard, growing up.” Deanna didn’t need to be an empath to commiserate with Geordi on this. Her experience of having a mother who was an ambassador meant her own childhood had also been nomadic.

Geordi shrugged, but Deanna knew she was on the right track. 

“Did you find it hard to make friends?”

Geordi had already been very defensive, but that question had sent him running for the hills. For someone as gregarious and easy-going as Geordi, it shouldn’t have been a painful question. And yet it was.

“I guess,” was all he said by way of a reply.

“Can you tell me about that?”

She could feel the anxiety twisting in him and it felt old and sharp, like torn, rusted metal. She could feel him trying to push away some very uncomfortable memories.

“It was hard, always being the new kid. And a few times, when my dad was posted somewhere remote and there weren’t any Federation schools, I’d be enrolled in the local education programme. That was pretty tough.”

Deanna nodded. It was a policy to encourage integration and cross-cultural understanding. It could be incredibly enriching for a child, but given the vast variation in curriculums, teaching methods and differing developmental rates, it also had its difficulties.

She also noted that Geordi was doing what he often did when things got painful. He’d offer a general reply which only skimmed the surface of what he was really feeling. Deanna knew this was a raw nerve and he was doing everything he could to protect himself from her touching it.

“There’s something else. Something specific that is bothering you.”

Geordi looked away, immense discomfort and shame beginning to stir from deep within him. 

“I know it’s painful, but can you tell me what it is?”

“In a couple of places, I got bullied,” he said simply, trying to hold off the emotions by keeping his reply straightforward and factual.

“Can you tell me about that?”

“It was a long time ago, Counselor.”

“You’ve never dealt with these feelings. They’re swept under the carpet, but they aren’t gone. It doesn’t matter if it was last week, or a year ago or thirty years ago, it still hurts. It still causes you pain and difficulty. Can you tell me what this is, it’s very specific.”

She could feel that Geordi’s mind had been drawn to something that churned and seethed and he was desperately trying to push it back into his subconscious.

“My dad got posted to Naos IV, way out on the edges of the Beta Quadrant. The teachers, the school, they didn’t… I don’t think they were really prepared for my needs.”

“This was before you had your first VISOR?”

Geordi nodded. “I was… pretty isolated, I guess. So, oh God…okay,” he sighed the words deeply, preparing himself. “Okay, uh, each week they’d appoint one of my classmates as, I don’t know, like my minder at recess because I didn’t have any real friends.”

Deanna shifted uncomfortably as felt his acute embarrassment. It was like a hot rock had been lodged inside her ribcage. It was a hard, burning pain that she tried her best to ignore as Geordi continued.

“It meant they couldn’t run around and play with everyone else. They all hated doing it. They’d get teased about it whenever it was their turn.” Geordi looked over to her. “Did wonders for my popularity,” he said, forcing a joke she knew he’d never felt less like sharing.

“Geordi… that’s… I can see what they were trying to achieve, but that is a horrible way to go about it.”

“You’re telling me?” Geordi said softly, his voice three decades’ distant.

“Were you the only Starfleet child enrolled?” Deanna wondered.

He didn't answer for a long time.

Then eventually he said, “Theresa Pickering.”

There was no comfort here in a fellow human or in a fellow child from a Starfleet family. When he said the name it felt like pins, sharp and vicious.

“She’d push me over, trip me up, take my stuff…”

Deanna knew he was wrestling with a decision. Of how much to tell her, of how deep he was going to let her take him. She felt him resign himself almost. He had committed this far.

“She’d take my stuff and throw it in the pond because she knew I wasn’t allowed to go near it.” He was frowning deeply. “My grandpa had made me a Braille communicator for my sixth birthday.” 

The waves of nostalgia and love Geordi had felt at the memory of his now-deceased grandfather were horribly tainted with the corrosive burn of shame and humiliation and guilt. 

“My mom and dad and grandpa could send me simple messages on it. I’d flip the face up and hold my fingers over it and it would spell out the message. About a week after I got it, Theresa had one of the other kids take it off me. She said it was babyish and stupid and she threw it in the pond.”

Deanna could sense that duplicity had been involved and that Geordi still blamed himself, quite violently, for falling for the ruse that had lost him that precious gift.

“When my mom asked me where it was, because her messages had stopped going through, I just said I’d lost it and I got yelled at pretty bad.”

“Why didn’t you tell your parents what was happening?”

“Because…” Geordi exhaled loudly. “Because they had enough to worry about.”

“Because of your disability?”

Geordi nodded.

“Were there tensions at home?”

“They didn’t argue exactly, but I could hear them get upset with each other. Sometimes there were raised voices. Whenever they shouted, it was always over me.” He was quiet for a while, mulling over those long-distant memories that still had the power to wound. “Mom was always pushing for the next thing, okay this didn’t work, what can we try next, where’s the next expert. Dad, I think he’d started to come to terms with the fact I wasn’t going to be able to see and they’d started to rub up against each other, especially those last few months on Naos.”

“Did they ever find out what was happening at school?”

“Kind of.”

“What do you mean?”

“My dad got called to the school once. Theresa… she’d taken to spinning me around until I fell over and one day she did it near the top of some steps. I fell all the way down and broke my arm.”

“Didn’t you tell your father then, what had been happening?”

“I was too upset at the hospital. Then the school talked to my dad without me. They made out that it was just an accident. Kids playing too rough. She’d cried and said sorry and they made me shake her hand.” Geordi’s thoughts were distant and remote. “I didn’t want to but I thought my dad would get in trouble if I didn’t.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Because her dad was an Admiral.”

Deanna closed her eyes, feeling that childish logic like a kick to her stomach.

“After that I didn’t want to go out at recess anymore. They let me stay in the library with my teacher and she let me play games with the computer.”

The image of that lonely, bullied little boy, sitting alone in the library while his classmates played outside broke Deanna’s heart.

Geordi’s feelings were still so raw and unresolved, so locked in the past, Deanna needed to try to open out his perspective.

“If you look back now, what do you think about Theresa? About why she did what she did?”

“At the time, I thought she was evil. I don’t know what I think now. Probably she was a spoilt brat who liked throwing her weight around.”

“Perhaps. But she was also alone on a new planet. She may have been scared and afraid too. She had no control or power over her life, so chose to exert some in the only way she could.”

“Are you trying to make me feel sorry for her?”

“Not necessarily, but if you can understand why she did those things, it might make you a little less hard on yourself.”

That surprised him, flipping his preconceptions as to her line of questioning. 

“I’m not sure I follow,” he said.

“None of this was your fault. Can you see that her behaviour stemmed from her own difficulties and was not because you were weak or deserved it or let it happen?”

Geordi was struggling to fit this into his long-established narrative of what had happened and why.

Deanna continued. “Your negative feelings are primarily directed at yourself and they are damaging. I think that your inability to deal with Lt. Barclay’s situation is rooted in these feelings of shame and humiliation and vulnerability. I think you see aspects of yourself in him and on an unconscious level, you are disgusted by that.”

“Now wait a second, Counselor,” Geordi said, his anger spiking. “I’m _not_ disgusted by Reg.”

“No,” Deanna said gently. “You’re disgusted by yourself.”

*~*~*~*

“You— you don’t have to do this, sir… I… I…”

They were in Ten Forward, alone at one of the corner tables, with only a few other patrons dotted around the room. Geordi held his hand up, stopping Reg in his tracks.

“I do need to do this. I want to apologise for not being more supportive or understanding. I’ve been talking with Counselor Troi.”

Reg looked momentarily appalled and Geordi swiftly continued, so as to assuage his rising anxiety.

“It was a scheduled appointment but she’s shown me that I was hiding from some painful experiences. I wanted to reach out to you to…” Suddenly the words were hard to say. The ones that really mattered, that really needed to be said, were catching in his throat. “Uh, I wanted to say that I know what it’s like, to not fit in and to feel lonely.”

“But… you’re…” Reg waved his hand at Geordi in disbelief. “You… Everybody thinks you’re great.”

Geordi smiled ruefully. “Not everybody,” he said, his mind having turned to his latest romantic disasters. His date with Christy had lasted scarcely an hour and Jennifer certainly didn’t think he was ‘great’. Nice was what she’d called him… _Damn_. 

“It might have been back when I was a little kid,” Geordi continued, “but I still should have seen it, I should have stepped in earlier. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologise. Please… you’re... you might not be that little boy anymore but I—I still am.”

Geordi looked closely at Reg. His patterns of blood flow and his heart rate were all over the place. He was having mild palpitations.

“What do you mean?”

“It never… it was supposed to change, to get better. Elementary school – bad, well, high school will be better. High school – even worse. The Academy will be different.” Reg shook his head forlornly. “It wasn’t.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Reg, truly. When I got to the academy, it was like I could breathe for the first time in my life.”

“You blossomed there?” Reg asked.

Geordi raised his eyebrows at Barclay’s choice of words. “I guess.”

“My mom,” Reg explained. “My mom always said I was just a late developer, that one day I would blossom.” He looked miserable. “I'm still waiting,” he said with a self-conscious shrug of his shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Reg. I’m sorry you’ve never felt like you fit in. I want to try and make this work.”

“I… I… uh, Commander… I—” Barclay’s words got completely stuck, but Geordi gave him some time to work out what he needed to say. “You don’t have to. I’m… I don’t fit in my own skin, I can’t see how… I don’t belong here.”

Geordi sighed deeply. “Why did you become an engineer?”

Reg looked surprised by the question. “I—uh, well… it was uh, math and science. They were the only things I was any good at.”

“And you are good at those things. Your test scores from the Academy are pretty high.”

“Might not be able to fix myself but I could fix pretty much anything else.” Reg smiled weakly. “I could always see how things were meant to go together.”

Geordi nodded in recognition, but let Reg carry on with what might have been the most lucid and flowing thing he’d ever heard him say.

“And… if you’re fixing a warp coil or a replicator,” Reg continued, “there’s no judgements, no snide comments, no expectations. And when you’ve fixed it, it powers up and you get a chirp or a confirmation code and… That’s the one thing I can do.”

He seemed a little flustered as he concluded, and his cheeks were flushed.

“I hear you, Reg,” said Geordi. “If you’re still thinking about putting in for that transfer, I won’t accept it. Not until we try and work this out. Okay?”

“Th-thank you, sir, but… you don’t have to—”

Geordi fixed Barclay in his VISOR’s sights and said quite firmly, “Yeah, Reg, actually I do.”


End file.
